First. Blog. Ever.

Who would have thought... If you had asked me 5 years ago whether I would be blogging, I would have said, 'you've got to be dreaming'. I was one of those people that eagerly learned about every piece of technology that was put in front of me, and often wondered, what kind of people have the time to create webpages about random things that they are doing, or problems that they have solved? Did these people even work!?!? :)

Well here I am; now with close to 10 years experience in the IT arena, ranging from .Net development, high availability web application operations, technical architecture, and more recently as a Lead Architect on an enterprise scale Dynamics CRM implementation using Agile SCRUM and Team System.

Don't worry, this isn't a trumpet blowing blog. Over the past 12 months I have really embraced Dynamics CRM as a rapid business application development platform, or Anything Relationship Management / xRM as the industry prefers. My colleagues laughed when I began talking about 'leveraging the power of dynamics' like he-man summoning the power of greyskull, but is it amazing how much functionality you can rapidly develop without having to write Data Access and UI Layers; you can really focus on meeting business requirements.

With it's many benefits, this platform comes many challenges, particularly when you start to scale up the development team. This blog will aim to talk about the challenges that I face as a technical architect, as well as solutions that my team and I come up with along the way.

Over the following months (and all going well) years, I will be writing a series of articles on my experiences in solving technical problems, mainly around implementing Dynamics CRM and it's various integration options using .Net, SharePoint, BizTalk, SSIS, CISCO Phone Integration, as well as development and deployment challenges, using developer tools such as Team System and operational management aspects.

Well enough waffle; stay tuned.

Dave